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When a Classmate Takes On Santa

By Jessica Lahey December 18, 2014 8:43 amDecember 18, 2014 8:43 am

Photo

Ben and Finn in 2006.Credit Tim Lahey

My oldest child was due on Christmas Day 1998, and since then, December has continued to be the birthplace of innocence and magic in our house. Like many families, we have enthusiastically perpetuated the mythology of the season, an odd mix of Santa Claus, my Latin teacher Saturnalia trivia and many discussions about Herschel’s Hanukkah goblins.

As my children have grown, however, December has also become the place where these same magical stories have met their inevitable demise.

The first eight or nine Decembers of our young family went without a hitch. We spun elaborate tales concerning mail delivery at the North Pole, reindeer defecating in the snowy yard and special telegrams to Santa when we had to be at the grandparents’ house on Christmas Day.

That is, until Dec. 18, 2006. My older son, Ben, was in third grade. He walked into the house after school, dropped his backpack on the kitchen floor and stared me down as I kneaded a batch of oatmeal molasses bread.

My first instinct — spawned from fear and denial — was to dismiss it out of hand.

“Well, that’s just crazy talk,” I said, kneading the bread a little more vigorously than necessary. I avoided his eyes.

Ben looked at me, trying not to look at him, then turned and left the kitchen. I fooled myself into believing I’d averted disaster, but later on that night, he circled back around to it, quite upset this time. I thought he was asleep, but suddenly, there he was in the living room in his pajamas. He sat in my lap in front of the fire, and we watched it for a bit before he said, “Part of my brain tells me I believe in Santa, and part of my brain tells me it’s the parents.”

Now that he was questioning his own hold on reality, it was time to come clean. In my defense, I hit him with the a well-rehearsed song-and-dance: Santa is real because he lives in our hearts, and the magic of Christmas is still alive because Ben gets to help it live on in his little brother, Finn. But he wasn’t buying it.

After an hour or so he understood and had stopped crying, so I sent him up to bed. As he left the room, he said, quietly, “I wish I didn’t know.”

He went to school the next morning with swollen eyes and a sullen demeanor, but by the time he came home, he had worked up some excitement about the role he would get to play as Santa for his little brother. He made plans to help Finn with his letter to Santa, couldn’t wait to nibble the carrots we set out for the reindeer and had some complicated strategy and arrangement for the Santa presents under the tree.

We all moved on. Well, Ben moved on. I wanted to tie his truth-telling classmate to a medieval torture device. Instead, I spoke to Peter’s mother and gave her some casual, friendly feedback that although I completely understood her family’s ideological stance on Santa Claus, for the sake of her younger children’s classmates, they might want to keep their family’s reality within their family, particularly around the holidays.

Ben’s teacher caught the worst of it, however, as many parents felt that she should have been able to control the spread of her student’s revelations. Clearly, she joked about a week later, her classroom management strategies were subpar. If she’d taken the right professional development class, Santa might have been saved.

A week later, Ben walked into the kitchen with a very odd look on his face — knowledge mixed with some smugness — and declared, “Hold on. If you guys are Santa, then that means you are also the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.”

And there it was. The other shoe.

A week later, we were all in the living room, looking out on the softly falling snow and commenting on the beautiful patterns the frost had created on the window. We had just been reading Finn’s favorite story, a picture book edition of “Little House in the Big Woods.” In the story, Ma Ingalls tells Mary, Laura and baby Carrie that Jack Frost comes on cold nights to create intricate patterns on the cabin windows, and the girls use her thimble to trace patterns in the frost. I jumped up and retrieved my grandmother’s thimble from my sewing kit, and we watched Finn make an ‘F’ in the frost with his fingertip, just like Laura. Ben looked over his shoulder at me with a knowing smile, and said, under his breath, “Well, at least that one can’t be you.”

Fast forward to December 2014. Finn, now 11, finally lost his first molar after twirling it around for nearly a week. He placed it next to my laptop on my writing desk with great pride and relief, and he was sporting a smile I’ve come to recognize presages significant, prerehearsed, tween snark.

“So,” he said, making extravagant air quotes, “are we still going to do this ‘Tooth Fairy’ thing?”

And that was that. Poof. For the first time since I’d first spun those tales of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy to my wide-eyed, credulous children, December was just December. Sure, there were still presents, and I could still recite my dorky Latin teacher lesson on the joyous holiday of Saturnalia, but my entire cadre of fantastical, magical helpers were gone, rendered obsolete by the passage of time, adolescence and a set of sarcastic air quotes.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more